In the previous chapter, we saw that analyzing your Google Ads campaigns is one of the most important aspects to consider if you want to achieve your marketing goals.
A marketing specialist can really add value when creating a campaign by using their ability to analyze what worked and what didn’t, and by coming up with ideas for improvement and optimization.
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
Now you know which indicators to analyze, you need to be able to come up with solutions for the issues you encounter in order to optimize your campaigns.
The seven campaigns in our example represent various scenarios that you’re likely to encounter when you create and launch your campaigns.
Some campaigns aren't working well at all, others are performing really well, and some are okay but just need to be optimized to get really good results.
How do we avoid getting lost in all this analysis? How can we make the right decisions when optimizing our campaigns?
These are great questions. In this chapter, I’m going to give you a method you can use to analyze and optimize your campaigns.
Do you remember in the first part of this course, in the second chapter, when we went through how the bidding system works? We talked about the Ad Rank algorithm that Google Ads uses to rank the ads.
These three components represent the three possible areas for improvement in each of our campaigns.
Now let’s look at these campaigns one by one.
Optimize for Clicks
As we saw in the previous chapter, the Accessories campaign performed really well. This is evidenced by its impression rate on the Search Network, which is higher than the average.
We can also see that the conversion rate is excellent, but the cost per conversion is a little high considering the fact that accessories are typically low-cost items with small margins.
Increasing the average bid for the ad groups in this campaign isn’t an option here because the cost per conversion could go up, which could mean we could quickly lose any profit margins.
The click-through rate is one of the factors we could improve in this campaign.
We know that the conversion rate is good, so that implies that our landing page is very efficient. So, we can assume that if we can get more people to the page, we’ll increase the number of conversions and our cost per conversion will therefore come down.
To achieve this, we need to increase our click-through rate.
There are a number of possible solutions:
Analyze the ad groups: within the Accessories campaign, we might have hats, gloves, and scarves, which means that some of these ad groups could be bringing down the overall campaign performance. Depending on what the results say, we might want to put some ad groups on hold and focus on others.
Analyze keywords: within the Hats ad group, some of the keywords are probably having a negative impact on the campaign performance. Again, we can put some on hold or delete them while emphasizing others.
Analyze ads: a click-through rate that is too low generally means that your ads aren’t effective. They’re being displayed, but rarely being clicked on. You’ll need to update them so that they are more relevant to your keywords and products, or try out some new, more appealing headlines and descriptions.
Either way, as long as the campaign is profitable, we can conclude that it has passed the test and therefore increase the budget.
The Brands campaign is a lot more problematic.
The ads within this campaign just don’t stand out, so they’re not appearing in search results, as evidenced by a dismal click-through rate of 0.14%.
The campaign budget hasn’t been fully depleted.
If the landing page uses the same design and layout as the other pages on the site, we might conclude that it’s actually the products on these pages (different brands that are sold in the store) that don’t meet users’ expectations.
This could indicate a more fundamental problem with the product range and product management.
If this is the problem, you can pause the campaign while you resolve the issue by clicking on the green dot beside the campaign name and selecting Pause.
Fortunately, the Winter Sale campaign is much more encouraging.
The click-through rate is much higher than the other two campaigns we’ve analyzed. It has generated lots of conversions with a slightly smaller margin due to the discounts, but it still remains profitable.
We can definitely increase the advertising budget on this campaign.
To recap, if our objective is to optimize our campaign for clicks, we need to study the following indicators: clicks, cost per click, and click-through rate (CTR).
The aim is to achieve the highest possible click-through rate and the lowest possible cost per click to increase click volume.
Optimize for Conversion
Our analysis will be a bit different for the Snowboard campaign. The impression rate is good, and the click-through rate is fine, but the conversion rate potentially has room for improvement.
The users seem interested in the ads, because they’re clicking on them, but once they get to the website, they don’t actually take any action.
So, we need to focus our attention on the website, either by displaying different products or improving the current landing page.
The Ski campaign seems to be a real missed opportunity. The click-through rate is brilliant, and the conversion rate is almost 10%.
Users love the ads and are going ahead and making purchases once they get to the website. The problem is that the number of clicks and conversions is very low (only 53 clicks for this campaign).
If we take a closer look at this campaign, we can easily see the cause of this problem: the cost per click (CPC).
This campaign has an average CPC of $1.32, which is the highest across all our campaigns. This places a limit on the total volume of clicks we can accept within our budget of $10 per day.
If we want to reduce the cost per click, we need to take a look at the keywords we’re targeting in this campaign. Maybe some of them have too much competition, which increases the average.
In this case, there are two possible solutions to consider:
Put these keywords on hold or find less costly ones using the Keyword Planner
Create new ads specifically for these keywords to increase your quality score
Let’s finish off our campaign roundup by looking at Women’s Clothes and Men’s Clothes.
These campaigns are doing really well, aren’t they? It doesn’t look like they need to be optimized.
Yes, at first glance, it doesn’t seem like these campaigns need much work. They have a decent click-through rate and very good conversion rates.
But we could still try to optimize them for even better results.
As we’ve seen throughout this chapter, we can create new variations on our existing ads, or tweak the keywords and review our landing page performance.
This might be a chance to test out a new type of campaign specifically for clothing, such as a Shopping campaign that we talked about in the first chapter of this course.
The goal is to have the highest possible conversion rate and the lowest possible cost per conversion if you want to increase the number of conversions.
These are just some of the changes you can put in place when you’re aiming for improvement across your campaigns.
After implementing these changes, you can analyze how your metrics are progressing, until you reach a point, through continuous improvement, where it would be difficult to make any further performance gains.
And at that moment, you can say that your Google Ads account is fully optimized! 🥳
We’re already at the end of the course. Congratulations for making it this far!
I hope you’ve enjoyed the course.
It’s been a pleasure sharing these skills and knowledge with you.
I hope to see you again in a future course. Until then, happy learning!
Let’s Recap!
The three main areas to focus on when optimizing a Google Ads campaign are the criteria used by Ad Rank, i.e., bid, quality score, and ad extensions.
The important metrics when optimizing for clicks are clicks, click-through rate, and cost per click.
Headlines, descriptions, keywords, and landing page are the main focus areas when optimizing a Google Ads campaign.
Now you know how to create and manage your own online advertising campaign using Google Ads! But before you go off and launch your first campaign, we have one last quiz for you to test your knowledge.
